Baggage performance has been elevated to very high priority in the majority of airlines. The Air Transport Industry transports some 2.25 billion bags annually. While 98% of all bags reach their destination at the same time as the owner, the 2% mishandled bags have been receiving increasingly negative press coverage and passenger complaints are on the rise. USA Department of Transport statistics indicate an 83% increase in mishandled baggage over the last 5 years, up to 7.3 mishandled bags per 1000 passengers. These figures are better looking than the reality because they exclude mishandled bags complaints where the passenger was inbound on an international flight.
In Europe, the Association of European Airlines reports 16.6 mishandled bags per 1000 passengers, a 21% increase over 3 years. The direct costs to airlines are substantial, estimated at nearly $4 billion annually, out of which transfer bags account for over 50% due to mishandlings.
It is, therefore, crucial to understand what happens during a bag transfer process at an airport to attempt to prevent the mishandling of a bag. Each bag has a determined standard path based on the airport topology, airport rules (such as type of connection involved), the agreement between airlines involved and the locations (i.e. terminal and gate/aircraft parking stand) of the arrival flight (inbound) and the connecting departure flight (outbound).
FIG. 1 shows a typical baggage transfer process at an airport. The bag goes through consecutive tasks (including for example but not limited to unload, induction and sorting at inbound or outbound transfer facilities, screening, load into cart or Unit Loading Device (ULD) and final load onto the outbound aircraft) with some “checkpoints” before or after each of the task involved.
At these checkpoints, many local systems are capable of sending Baggage Processed Messages (BPM) via Baggage Handling Systems (BHS).
Thus in FIG. 1 a bag is shown as going through 7 distinct stages labelled 1 to 7. At stage 1 a bag arrives on an inbound flight 10, is unloaded and handled by a baggage handling agent BHA 12 and delivered by trolley to stage 2. The time of arrival of the bag at stage 1 can be recorded at stage 1, and other stages which involve baggage handling agents and baggage transfer agents as indicated by the stopwatch in the figure. At stage 2 the bags are delivered by the baggage handling agent to a interline bag transfer agent IBTA 14 whose responsibility is to ensure that bags are received at the inbound terminal and successfully delivered to the outbound terminal for a connecting flight. The time of arrival at the IBTA is recorded. At this point the bags may have to be retrieved by passengers and taken through immigration and customs (I&C) 16 before being passed back to the IBTA at stage 3. The time at which the bags are received back is also recorded. While the bags are under the authority of the IBTA, the process flow can be monitored at a bag transfer management back office 18 under the authority of an interline bag transfer supervisor IBTS 20 who has access to real time data relating to the time taken between each of the stages as represented by dashboard 22 in FIG. 1 and who can generate statistical data relating to baggage handling as represented by chart 24 in FIG. 1. The IBTA is responsible for delivering the bags to the outbound terminal. Stage 4 is the arrival of those bags at the outbound terminal which again is timed. The bags are then required to pass through security checks shown as stage 5 airport security AS 26 and then proceed to stage 6 where they are delivered back to the baggage handling agent 12 for loading onto the outbound flight 28 at stage 7. Both stages 6 and 7 are timed.
FIG. 1 shows the process in a typical airport. Of course problems arise when a bag is lost or misrouted. There are many known systems capable of monitoring where a bag is last seen. However the determination of Hot Bag (i.e. a bag at risk) is usually manual. Although some Baggage Reconciliation Systems can determine whether some bags are hot bags, they provide such information on a bag enquiry basis. These known systems are purely reactive.
Some airlines have developed systems which track their own bags very well, even possibly raising some alerts, but these systems only process connecting bags to and from the same airline. Those systems are incapable of dealing with interline bags (where the inbound airline is different from the outbound airline in a connection).
Thus those responsible for the baggage transfer process have to rely on their knowledge and experience to identify and deal with problems occurring on interline transfers and take appropriate actions based on other information coming from other systems such as Flight Information Display Systems (FIDS) and generally allocate someone to a task using a Resource Management System (RMS).
Moreover, although the airlines or their handling agents know the reasons why bags are usually mishandled, it is difficult for them to report on the specific reason for mishandling any given bag which makes the identification and solving of specific problems difficult.
There is a real need of a solution capable of gathering all the rules applicable to the transfer process at airports in order to determine automatically and intelligently whether a bag is at risk of missing its connection. Whenever such bag is flagged at risk, depending on the risk, an alternate path may be suggested to expedite the bag to its intended connecting flight.
A locally mishandled bag may still be reconciled with its owner on time by reflighting the bag. This involves making the bag travelling without its owner/passenger to the final destination of the passenger. To enable reflighting it is important to flag a bag as mishandled as soon as possible otherwise the bag cannot be sent to its destination in time to be picked up by the passenger.
We have appreciated that although this type of baggage mishandling may be avoided or mitigated by improving local processes and procedures, it is as important for a baggage handling system to be able to understand why a bag has been mishandled. Existing solutions are not capable of such understanding and it is therefore an aim of the invention to provide a system that addresses this problem.
Although this problem has been explained in the context of baggage handling it applicable to any logistics process in a hub-and-spoke model, involving the transfer of an item (such as cargo, parcel or mail) which has to go through consecutive tasks with checkpoints and where the items may be at risk of not being delivered to the destination on time.